Felt Introduces New Logo, Bids Goodbye To Model Years

Having been in the bike industry for 25 years in retail as well as wholesale, this is a great move by Felt. Along with Cervelo (and who else is doing this already?) hopefully we will see a gradual shift to more buying confidence from the consumer (knowing their bike won’t be out of date in 6 months – I know it’s silly but it’s consumer mentality driven by the marketing people). Along with this it would be good to see less discounting at the retailer end as well as the wholesale end. This should be good for everyone in the industry. Not to mention more profitability for the manufacturers as their R&D dollar goes further. Hopefully the more brands that do this the more will follow suit. As Gary said when the Gary Fisher Collection got announced “I’m excited!”

@scentofreason

I think you are missing the point of bike RUMOR

Code for “Too hectic of a schedule for us to keep up with. Plus, we only need one engineer, whereas we currently have 52. Downsizing helps you, the rider, since our bikes won’t cost as much since we are only paying one dude $12K/year (he’s an intern, so he works cheap). We love our riders, which is why we’re doing this. In fact, we’re cutting down on all models, and offering only one rigid hardtail with Shimano Alivio spec. So much cheaper and easier to fix. No suspension, no Di2 batteries to fiddle with, no messy hydraulic/mineral fluid. Just a nice Felt-branded rigid hardtail.”

Love it! I’ve always been a big fan of Felt for their value and affordability. This should move things further in that direction.

While I believe that this a good move especially on the bread and butter models that range from $500.0 to $1500.00 I would like to see how it will work with the more expensive road and mountain bikes.

You cannot have an unlimited supply of upper end bikes for shops to just order when they have a sale. While that would be great it is not realistic. Plus component lead times at the very least with Shimano and SRAM are a minimum of 90 day usually pushing 120 or 150 days.

And the bicycle frame manufacture does not control the rest of the industry when it comes to components and wheels so when those companies change every year the non – model year bikes on the upper end that you still have will unfortunately be dated. Plain and simple. Customers paying top dollar want the latest and greatest and I do not expect that to change.

Plus will this be the end of close out priced bikes? Shops usually need a balance of inline and closeouts because the way the customer has been conditioned and that is not going to change either.

Unless Felt is going to a business model on their upper end bikes like the smaller boutique companies do by offering several built kits and bikes built to order so when newer components and wheel become available and is what customers are asking for I am not sure how this at least for the upper end product will work.

Again bread and butter bikes its a no brainer. I don’t know many people that care what components, wheels, etc come on their hybrid or even what model year it is but on the upper end the consumers usually knows more about things that are about to become available before the shops do.

Hope it works for them.

Since I live in Felt’s backyard, I’m happy for their changes. I know a few Cervelo shops who are happy to not have a model year. I know Felt has had their supply issues, but the issue is global manufacturing. I doubt someone buying a hybrid is worried about waiting for their size to come in, but someone ordering a $5000 tri bike wants it soon. Personally, I think bike companies need to move more manufacturing back to the states. It might into profit margins, but it helps increase available supply. All it takes is one storm, one strike, or lost paperwork to delay the delivery of your bike. I grew up near Waterloo when all of Trek’s bikes were made there. A global economy has it’s place, but you also need to balance the needs of the customers.

@Good Move–I’m pretty sure this is how Surly has always done it.

“We got what we got when we got ’em.” Go felt!

Three cheers for TOPOGRAPHY!

Yes, a good bike is a good bike and should be updated when needed, not required at the end of each year.

As nice as axing the year model scheme sounds, it’s not really taking a major change to get it done because for some manufacturers people see through it already as mere labeling.

Most people get that Giant updates their bikes like every 4 or so years. The CAAD10 is expected to stay how it is until the ever-clearly named CAAD12 comes along. If Felt keeps their AR frame for about 3-5 years, they’re going to update the group packages (like if SRAM wireless releases in that timeframe) and colors down the road; all companies do this. And if someone asks about a particular package and color scheme, the year model is going to come up anyway.

I’ll take the contrary view. I really like the model years. There was an excitement around TDF and I’d go check out the latest offerings from all the name brands. Even if they are small tweaks or just color changes, they are welcome changes. Not doing anything to optimize inventory seems a little lazy to me.

There was also a sense of predictability, you could plan your purchases of a bike with a new group set knowing roughly when stuff would be announced. How do you know that what you buy today won’t be obsolete in a week after you buy it?

It also leads to interesting problems of how do you identify a bike model. When they do change, are they going to change the name or will I need to identify the model by a given year. And within the model year, you might get changes to components, what then?

As a consumer, you could also pick up nice deals on previous model year inventory as well.

I wish they would rethink this…and so would Trek and others.

I gotta say, from a marketing perspective it’s a boneheaded move. If I’m a consumer shopping around, do I want a current model year bike (with what would presumably be the latest tech) or do I look at the Felt bike that has gone unchanged for 3 years…

This approach works well with limited model boutique brands, of which Felt is not. “Oh welcome customer, here are our bikes available for you to buy. Yes, those two are on sale because they are 2014 models. This Felt here? Well, been sitting here for 2 years, but it’s not on sale…they don’t do model years”. I just don’t get it. Anybody else hear that SC is moving toward a more conventional model year system? That’s because they felt the exact opposite, that not having a set model year caused potential customers to sit on their hands contemplating whether or not to pull the trigger, because they never knew when/if the latest SC revision would drop.

With all the talk about model years (yay, Felt!), did anyone notice that their new logo is nearly identical to Fuji’s current logo? Looks like the same font was used for both. If your name is the same number of letters as your competitor’s and it starts with the same exact letter, you might want to avoid the font they used. Or at least pick a cooler brand to copy…

I applaud the strategy. Its a smart and considerate move. There’s a bubble out there and the bike industry is running over one another to burst it … I will definitely look at Felt more closely in the near future.